Intel’s new Neural Compute Stick 2 might bring science fiction technology to life
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. — Arthur C. Clarke
Sometimes the news is so big, a guy has to stop what he’s doing and write an article for his favorite technology magazine. Such an event happened the other day with Intel’s announcement of the Neural Compute Stick 2. It’s a full capability artificial intelligence and vision processing device in a USB stick. I’m a pragmatic guy who is always thinking about what will be in the future, but with this announcement, the future’s arriving a little sooner than I had planned. It’s time to think about the impact on the broadcast industry and what we can prototype, RIGHT NOW.
To be sure, AI of this horsepower, about 4 teraflops/second (which I am guessing is smarter than a mosquito, but not as intelligent as a flounder), has been with us for a while and has been available through the cloud (think Amazon Alexa or Siri). This isn’t even Intel’s first neural network stick. But the addition of vision processing with this level of capability and without an internet connection means it can be used in real-time applications. And at just $99 each, every device will soon have the capabilities of being “smart.”
So what will this change? The short answer is … just about everything. But readers of this article want to know how this will affect TV production and consumption. So here are some predictions: More at TV Technology